"fdisk" - Format Disk Partitions

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∟"fdisk" - Format Disk Partitions

Provides a tutorial example on how to manage disks, including USB drives, partitions and formats on Linux systems.

If you want to manage partitions of storage devices like hard disks and USB drives, you need to learn how to use the "fdisk (format disk)" command as shown in this tutorial.

1. List of storage devices using "ls -l /dev/sd?" command. The "?" wildcard stands for 1 character to exclude partitions on each devices.

herong$ ls -l /dev/sd?

brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8,  0 Mar 26 21:17 /dev/sda
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 16 Apr  4 02:25 /dev/sdb
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 32 Apr  4 08:02 /dev/sdc
brw-------. 1 root root 8, 48 Apr  4 08:25 /dev/sdd

2. List partitions on first hard disk storage device using "fdisk -l" command. I see 5 partitions with different formats.

herong$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x2f50ca78

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *          2048  167776255  167774208    80G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2        167776256 1953523711 1785747456 851.5G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        167778304 1748721663 1580943360 753.9G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6       1748723712 1750820863    2097152     1G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7       1750822912 1953523711  202700800  96.7G 8e Linux LVM

3. List partitions on a USB storage device using "fdisk -l" command. I see one partition with W95 FAT32 format, with is compatible with Windows computers.

herong$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disk /dev/sdc: 7.5 GiB, 8021606400 bytes, 15667200 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x04030201

Device     Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1       10392 15667199 15656808  7.5G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)